Salute

“A dancer dies twice—once when they stop dancing, and this first death is more painful.” －－Martha Graham

Salute comprises 13 modern dance pieces created by dancer Sheu Fang-Yi for the film along with Heretic (1923), the first group dance piece by Martha Graham, the mother of modern dance. With these dance pieces, Sheu, now at a crossroads of her career, relates her glorious first two decades, followed by a funeral as a farewell to her past and preparation for an unknown future. 

Salute is a semi-autobiographical film on dancer Sheu Fang-Yi. It is a feature-experimental-documentary film including four important nodes in her career: “initiation,” “resolution,” “fame,” and “homecoming.”

The director and the dancer worked in parallel to make this film. With a dual narrative, the dancer’s life and creative process were filmed in a documentary style to show how she expands on and resolves her professional dancer career through dance, thereby analyzing the evolution of ideas in her brain. The original choreographic pieces are combined with music, art, scenes, cinematography, and literary concepts and transformed into dance performances through a poetic cinematic contextualization. With the two narrative threads intertwined like twists and turns, the film wavers between the real and streams of consciousness. In the end, does the film enables an understanding about the artist’s view of life or a plunge into the dream space of the artist?